Thursday, January 15, 2015

Ten(+) Years of music21 (pt. 1)

An important milestone for music21 passed unnoticed by me a few weeks ago: ten years since the first time that code (well mostly documentation and tests) that still remains somewhere in the music21 codebase was run and did something useful (a scrambled loop for a composition project I was working on called Fine dead sound, after Faulkner). It seemed worth saying a bit about the history of the project and things learned along the way.

Music21 started as a Perl project -- the oldest code I can find that even vaguely resembles the current music21 comes from November 2003, a 30k Perl script to label a Bach chorale with Roman numerals and correct keys (I still need to publish the algorithm somewhere since I haven't seen a better one). It had no graphical output except using David Rakowski's Lassus font. I was able to get it back up and running and through the modern miracle of web fonts, everyone (except IE users) can play with the oldest music21 system at: http://www.trecento.com/test/lassus.cgi?num=260. If I remember correctly, chords in red had only a passing functionality, the small letters are the roots of chords and the second line of text is the locally active key. Pivot chords are labeled in brackets. This was done for an assignment in Avi Pfeffer's AI and Music class; others in my group had already produced the code (in C I believe) for removing passing tones from the score.

I had begun that project using Humdrum, a system I knew well and still have great admiration for, but I began to need to encapsulate more and more items into individual classes. I googled around, because I figured someone would have already gotten far in an object-oriented replacement for Humdrum. But I found nothing, so when I got back to the project about a year later I started creating generalized objects which I incorporated into a package called "PMusic" for "Perl Music." (I think I first called it just "Music" but realized that this was going to be a problem.) Here is part of the PMusic code for Chords, written on 12/31/2004. Good documentation was already a music21 principle, but names of notes were still based on Kern/Humdrum:

=head1 PMusic::Chord (class)

class for dealing with chords

$ch1 = PMusic::Chord->new(['CC', 'E', 'g', 'b-']);

Note double set of brackets, indicating a perl array reference.

Doesnt deal with rests yet. Chords of more or less than four notes might

returns the bass note or sets it to note. Usually defined as the first noteObj

but we want to be able to override this. You might want an implied

bass for instance... v o9.

=cut

sub Bass {

my $self = shift;

$self->{Bass} = $_[0] ifdefined $_[0];

$self->{Bass} ||= $self->NoteObjs->[0];

return $self->{Bass};

}

At this point I was living in Rome at the American Academy as a Rome Prize fellow in Medieval Studies, and halfway through my fellowship I realized that none of this code was going to write a six-hundred page dissertation on fourteenth-century music fragments, and besides, I had job interviews to prepare for, and later, students to teach at Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and then MIT, none of which (yes, including MIT) cared that I was working on generalized software for musical analysis as a side project. I also saw how long this project was going to take. And besides, I was still convinced that someone had already written a generalized OO toolkit for musical analysis, I just wasn't searching well enough. So the project was put aside for almost two years before it reemerged in Python, as the (to be written) Part 2 explains.